Stavanger was interesting.
First of all, it's the de facto oil capital of Norway, and the source of much of its wealth. Where Denmark relies on it's shipping and biomedical for paying for all the "free" health care, Norway leans on oil.
It's also not a mess of sckyscrapers, though there are some moderately tall buildings. The food was excellent, but of course hideously expensive in actual restaurants.
The cathedral there was in early stages of renovation, with workmen literally tapping every stone one at a time to determine which ones were bad, but still was a sight worth seeing.
Most interesting to me was the oil museum. It certainly makes an impression on how vital it is when they have an entire museum dedicated to oil production and the history of the oil industry in Norway.
If you follow the map, the first stop is a small theater where you get to watch our protagonist from The Wave play the part of a good little kid who finally came to terms with his dad working in oil industry in a short film called "Oil Kid" - subtitles helpfully in English.
Walking through teh various displays, you learn how (we currently think) oil is formed, and how and where it is found. You see a history of the types of rigs, as well as the various disasters and progression of safety measures. Norwegians being Norwegians, maintenance is not overlooked, nor the use of divers and ROV's to help maintain and hook up the rigs. Kids had fun in the escape tubes as a playground activity.
Drill bits, in the geo-mining world, are completely different than what you hook up to your typical DeWalt.
Specialty computers had to be built...
And escape pods were designed more to survive the drop and seas than creature comforts....
Most impressive of all was the selection of scale models, one of them a full mockup built in the last pre-3D CAD generation of drill platforms to make sure that the rooms all were arranged properly, there was space for everything, and nothing too explosive was placed too close to things that would make them go boom.
Despite the overt "rah rah oil!" and "our heroes who died in tragic deaths" of much of the museum, a few bits showed a schizophrenic streak. Several questions in an interactive display were skewed toward "we should shut down oil/go green", but most obvious and overt was an entire display on green energy, featuring, among other things, a quote by Ocasio-Cortez.
It really has the feel of being bolted on for appeasment pourposes, given how pro-oil the whole rest of the building is, from start to finish.
The header shot was taken from an outside platform on the museum, and while it's not in the picture, you could see several of the oil support vessels, distinct by their shape, heading out or coming in.
